Our Mission

Our Mission

PROTECTING RIGHTS. CHANGING LIVES.

Imagine being six years old and finding out that you are going to live with strangers. Imagine being twelve and starting at a new school with no parents waiting at home to hear about your first day. Imagine being sixteen and walking into the courtroom where a judge will decide if you can return home.

When children are in foster care, the biggest decisions in their lives are often made for them, without their input. At Lawyers For Children, our mission is to give children in foster care a voice in the decisions that will change their lives. Since LFC’s founding by Karen J. Freedman in 1984, our attorneys and social workers have been listening to their clients, protecting their legal rights, and empowering them with the tools and resources they need to grow and thrive.

Each year, our staff of seventy professionals represents over 3,000 individual children in more than 6,000 court proceedings. Our advocacy helps children find safe and loving homes more quickly and helps minimize the trauma of foster care placement. We also help youth aging out of foster care access the education, housing, and employment they need to transition to independence.

We are continuously evolving our practice with special projects that focus on the most vulnerable among our clients, including LGBTQ youth, children with special educational needs, youth who have experienced sexual abuse and exploitation, and young people with immigration issues. Our public policy project tracks recurring challenges for young people across all of our individual cases and uses this data to promote comprehensive reform of the foster care system through both legislative advocacy and class action litigation.

At Lawyers For Children, we are incredibly proud of our award-winning interdisciplinary advocacy model, but our clients say that what makes us so special to them is how we make them feel. We make sure that the children and young people we represent know that they are never alone as they face the challenges of foster care.